Let us take the chance, then, after so many glosses, of an ingenuous reading. Let us try to see what happens. But is this not right away impossible? … The point is right away to go beyond, in one fell swoop, the first glance and thus to see there where this glance is blind, to open. one’s eyes wide there where one does not see what one sees. One must see, at first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility itself For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw, the error of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible. (Derrida)
in his or her culture and discipline, whatever it may be, in particular philosophy, medicine, psychiatry, and more precisely here, because we are speaking of memory and of archive, the history of texts and of discourses, political history, legal history, the history of ideas or of culture, the history of religion and religion itself …
(Derrida)
The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general.
Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of
sense in general. The trace is the differance which opens appearance
[1′ apparaUre] and signification. Articulating the living upon the nonliving
in general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more
ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent
signification than an opaque energy and no concept of metaphysics can
describe it. And as it is a fortiori anterior to the distinction between regions
of sensibility, anterior to sound as much as to light, is there a sense in
establishing a “natural” hierarchy between the sound-imprint, for example,
and the visual (graphic) imprint? The graphic image is not seen; and the
acoustic image is not heard. The difference between the full unities of the
voice remains unheard. And, the difference in the body of the inscription
is also invisible.
(Derrida)
Origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference,
this fabric of the trace, permits the difference between space and time to be
articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of an experience (of a Hsame”
lived out of a “same” body proper [corps propreJ ). This articulation therefore
permits a graphic (“visual” or Htactile,” Hspatial”) chain to be adapted,
on occasion in a linear fashion, to a spoken (“phonic,” “temporal”) chain.
It is from the primary possibility of this articulation that one must begin.
Difference is articulation
(Derrida)
Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious
of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [derive] the
emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire of presence. That
becoming-or that drift/derivation-does not befall the subject which
would choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the
subject’s relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution
of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organization, that is to say, of the
economy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary essence.31 And the
original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing
or the referent
(Derrida)
In their form and in their grammar, these questions are all turned toward the past: they ask if we already have at our disposal such a concept and if we have ever had any assurance in this regard. To have a concept at one’s disposal, to have assurances with regard to it, this presupposes a closed heritage and the guarantee which is sealed, in some sense, by this heritage. And the word and the notion of the archive seem at first, admittedly, to point toward the past, to refer to the signs of consigned memory, to recall faithfulness to tradition. If we have attempted to underline the past in these questions from the outset, it is also to indicate the direction of another problematic. As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future.
(Derrida)
“This condensation of history, of language, of the encyclopedia, remains here indissociable from an absolutely singular event, an absolutely singular signature, and therefore also of a date, of a language, of an autobiographical inscription. In a minimal autobiographical trait can be gathered the greatest potentiality of historical, theoretical, linguistic, philosophical culture — that’s really what interests me.
(Derrida)
In an enigmatic sense which will clarify itself perhaps (perhaps, because nothing
should be sure here, for essential reasons), the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. This is not the question of a concept dealing with the past which might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in the times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise.
(Derrida)
In order to make apparent a play that is not comprehended in this philosophical or scientific space, one must think of play in another way. Indeed, this is what I am trying to do within what is already a tradition-that of Nietzsche, for example-but
one which also has its genealogy. On the basis of thinking such as Nietzsche’s (as interpreted by (Eugen) Fink), the concept of play, understood as the play of the world, is no longer play· in the world. That is, it is no longer determined and contained by something, by the space that would comprehend it. I believe that it is only on this basis and on this condition that the concept of play can be reconstructed and reconciled with all of the-if you will-“deconstructive”-type
notions, such as trace and writing …
(Derrida)
Once play is no longer simply play in the world, it is also no longer the play of someone who plays. Philosophy has always made play into an activity, the activity of a subject manipulating objects. As soon as one interprets play in the sense of playing, one has already been dragged into the space of classical philosophy where play is dominated by meaning, by its finality, and consequently by something that surpasses and orients it. In order to think of play in a radical way, perhaps one must think beyond the activity of a subject manipulating objects according to or against the rules, et cetera.
(Derrida)
In very summary terms, then, this is the principle of what I would have liked to set in motion. The fort/da* at the center of “Freud’s Legacy” is also, of course, a discourse on play. And, typically, Freud indeed does propose an interpretation
of the child’s game.
(In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes a child’s play with a bobbin on a string. As he casts it away from him, he utters “o-o-o,” which his mother interprets as the word “fort” (away, far): as he pulls it back, he says .. a-a-a,” which according to the mother means “do” (here).-Tr. )
(Derrida)
He piles up hypotheses: the child throws his bobbin. he brings it back in order to say this or that to his mother, and so forth. I won’t attempt to reconstitute here this whole very complicated scene. To be sure, the theme of play is there. However, if one understands the fort/da beyond what it seems Freud intends to say, then one may exceed the limits of the game toward the play of the world where the fort/da is no longer simply the relation of subject to object. It is. instead, that which has absolute command over all experience in general.
(Derrida)
To arrive at such a point-and I think I attempt this gesture. in a discreet manner at least, in the course of that text-one must nevertheless begin by reading Freud in a certain way. If one does, then one realizes that basically he does not stop at any single interpretation of the fort/da.
(Derrida)
–
He himself is doing fort/da with his own interpretations, and it never stops. His own writing,his own deportment in this text is doing fort/da. Perhaps the performative is in play as well, in a very serious manner. but the game is also very serious and demands great concentration. He plays with this fort/da in his writing: he doesn’t “comprehend” it. He writes himself this scene, which is descriptive
or theoretical but also very profoundly autobiographical and performative to the degree that it concerns him in his relation with his heirs
(Derrida)
A discourse on life/death must occupy a certain space between
logos and gramme, analogy and program, as well as between the differing senses of program and reproduction.
(Derrida)
What one calls life-the thing or object of biology and biography-does
not stand face to face with something that would be its opposable ob-ject: death, the thanatological or thanatographical.
(Derrida)
In the first place, a phoenix motif. Once again, the destruction
of life is only an appearance: it is the destruction of the appearance of life. One buries or burns what is already dead so that life, the living feminine, will be reborn and regenerated from these ashes. The vitalist theme degeneration/regeneration is active and central throughout the argument. This revitalization, as we have already seen, must first of all pass by way of the tongue, that is, by way of the exercise of the tongue or language, the treatment of its body, the mouth and the ear …
(Derrida)
That which returns is the constant affirmation, the “yes, yes” on which I insisted yesterday. That which signs here is in the form of a return, which is to say it
has the form of something that cannot be simple. It is a selective return without negativity, or which reduces negativity through affirmation, through alliance or marriage (hymen), that is, through an affirmation that is also binding on the other or that enters into a pact with itself as other.
(Derrida)
“This visitation of Yahweh is so radically surprising and over-taking that he who receives does not even receive it himself, in his name. His identity is as if fractured. He receives without being ready to welcome since he is no longer the same between the moment at which God initiates the visit and the moment at which, visiting to him, he speaks to him. This is indeed hospitality par excellence in which the visitor radically overwhelms the self of the ‘visited’ and the chez-soi of the host. For as you know these visitations and announcements will begin with changes of names, heteronomous changes, unilaterally decided by God …
(Derrida)
“(A deconstructionist reading) would mean respect for that which cannot be eaten—respect for that in a text which cannot be assimilated. My thoughts on the limits of eating follow in their entirety the same schema as my theories on the indeterminate or untranslatable in a text. There is always a remainder that cannot be read, that must remain alien. This residue can never be interrogated as the same, but must be constantly sought out anew, and must continue to be written.”
(Derrida)
” Narcissism! There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutedly destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the other – even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation – must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic. Beyond that, there are little narcissisms, there are big narcissisms, and there is death in the end, which is the limit. Even in the experience – if there is one – of death, narcissism does not absolutely abdicate its power.”
(Derrida)
The point is that the eternal return is not a new metaphysics of time or of the totality of being, et cetera, on whose ground Nietzsche’s autobiographical
signature would come to stand like an empirical fact on a great ontological structure. (Here, one would have to take up again the Heideggerian interpretations of the eternal return and perhaps problematize them.) The eternal return always involves differences of forces that perhaps cannot be thought in terms of being, of the pair essence-existence, or any of the great metaphysical structures to which Heidegger would like to relate them. As soon as it crosses with the motif of the
eternal return, then the individual signature, or, if you like,the signature of a proper name, is no longer simply an empirical fact grounded in something other than itself.
(Derrida)
Without writing, un-writing, the unwritten switches over to a question of reading on a board or tablet which you perhaps are. You are a board or a door; we will see much later how a word can address itself, indeed confide itself to a door, count on a door open to the other.
(Derrida)
With a confident obedience, with a certain abandon that l fed here in it, the plural seems to follow: an order, after the beginning of an inaudible sentence, like an interrupted silence. It follows an order and, notice, it even obeys; it lets itself be dictated. It asks (for) itself.
(Derrida)
This concept of a ghost is as scarcely graspable in its self as the ghost of a concept. Neither life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other. The “versus” of the conceptual opposition is as unsubstantial as a camera’s click. Ghosts: the concept of the other in the same, the completely other, dead, living in me.
(Derrida)
To write—to him, to present to the dead friend within oneself the gift of his innocence.
(Derrida)
Without either showing or hiding herself. This is what took place. She had
already taken her place “docilely,” without initiating the slightest activity,
according to the most gentle passivity, and she neither shows nor hides herself.
The possibility of this impossibility derails and shatters all unity, and
this is love; it disorganizes all studied discourses, all theoretical systems
and philosophies. They must decide between presence and absence, here
and there, what reveals and what conceals itself.
(Derrida)
Yes, to whom and of what would we be making a gift? What are
we doing when we exchange these discourses? Over what are we keeping
watch? Are we trying to negate death or retain it? Are we trying to put
things in order, make amends, or settle our accounts, to finish unfinished
business? With the other? With the others outside and inside ourselves?
(Derrida)
Forgetting and gift would therefore be each in the condition of the
other. This already puts us on the path to be followed. Not a particular
path leading here or there, but on the path, on the Weg or Bewegen
(path, to move along a path, to cut a path), which, leading nowhere,
marks the step that Heidegger does not distinguish from thought.
The thought on whose path we are, the thought as path or as movement
along a path is precisely what is related to that forgetting that
Heidegger does not name as a psychological or psychoanalytic category
but as the condition of Being and of the truth of Being.
(Derrida)
mark forshee 